Lion Interactive

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re an international non-profit. My position is Digital Communications and Marketing.

What challenge were you trying to address with LION Interactive?

The goal for our project with LION has been to create websites that feature our research and support our mission.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’re mostly content websites. All of the websites were built on WordPress. They did design and development.

How did you come to work with LION Interactive?

LION Interactive had an existing relationship with my company when I joined the organization, and we’ve been very pleased with their work and have been happy to continue that relationship.

How much have you invested with LION Interactive?

I would like to keep the cost of the project confidential.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with LION associates on many projects, and we are currently working with them on new projects. LION associates’ work with us predates my employment here. I think that they probably started in 2011.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

That’s confidential.

How did LION Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

LION has exceptional project management. I’ve always been impressed with every project manager they’ve had. They’ve always thoroughly understood the project. They’ve always been great at communicating with the client and making the client’s needs understandable to the developers and vice versa. They’ve always kept projects on track, on time, and on budget.

What did you find most impressive about LION Interactive?

I appreciate that LION Interactive is very easy to work with, that they're dependable, and that they are really nice people who are good at their job and care a lot about the end result.

Are there any areas LION Interactive could improve?

No.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are the ‎Pasadena Convention & Visitors Bureau. I’m the Director of Marketing and Communications.

What challenge were you trying to address with LION Interactive?

When we were approaching creating a website for Visit Pasadena, we really came to LION Interactive because we were looking for a great aesthetic, and something that was also easy for our staff to update and use on a regular basis. That was the main challenge.

What was the scope of their involvement?

LION Interactive designed the website, and they also created a calendar option for us to upload on our site all of the events that were happening in the city. They also created a blog feature on the website. The site was built on WordPress. They did not include any advertising, but we are not a membership organization, so it wasn’t a priority for us.

How did you come to work with LION Interactive?

We had gone through a bidding process and actually looked through a lot of the companies that were in our market, but I went to LION Interactive because I had worked with them previously at the Urban Land Institute. I knew their work. I knew the folks that worked at LION, so I was already comfortable with them. It was already a great working relationship, so I felt like I could trust them to put our website together.

How much have you invested with LION Interactive?

I believe it was under $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We are still working with them. I think the website took about six months to create, and it launched in January 2015.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I looked at the analytics for the last fiscal year and we had 120% growth, so we doubled our number of users on the website. We also had 90% growth in page views.

How did LION Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

Fantastic. It was very easy to work with them. We had regular phone calls, and then they also had a procedure for them to connect with us on a regular basis. They were always checking in by email and we also had our regular meetings.

What did you find most impressive about LION Interactive?

I really trust LION Interactive's advice. I feel like they are always on our side, trying to push us forward in thinking about what the trends are in websites, and what are the things that are going to really be helpful for us. They’re also very honest with me. When I want to do something and it’s cost-prohibitive, they’ll try and figure out another solution that will actually fit within my budget. I really appreciate that as well.

Are there any areas LION Interactive could improve?

No. I think it was really helpful because we did have a couple of bugs, and addressing them was really easy to go through and figure out how do we mitigate those problems and create a really good website. When I’ve gone into the tourism industry, I’ve had actually a few of my competitors say, “Hey, I’m looking at your website as I design our website.” It’s really a testament to LION’s work.

Please describe your organization.

We're creating an online print brand. What I mean by that is we want to sell printing on the Internet.

What is your position?

I'm the CEO.

What business challenge were you trying to address with LION Interactive?

We initially hired LION Interactive to build our home page – a marketing website.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We had an idea of what we wanted the brand to be about and an idea of what we wanted to say on our website, but we used LION in a consultative manner to help us make the brand more professional. We had a logo, but they talked to us about colors, fonts, white space – all that design insight that helped us appear to be a more professional brand on the Internet. It started with a consultative phase where they talked to us a lot about the persona of our customer, talked about the market that we want to serve, helped us flesh out how the brand would work on the Internet, and then they actually went ahead and built our home page. It's built in WordPress. They offered some ideas about marketing but, at the end of the day, I don't believe that's their core business. It's not what they bill themselves as.

How did you come to work with LION Interactive?

I think it was a Google search for agencies in the Bay Area. I started in San Francisco and then broadened our search to the Bay Area and even Sacramento. At the end of the day, I had a guy in Sacramento who had frankly unbelievably a great price, but maybe too low. Most of the agencies in San Francisco that seemed qualified.

A year and a half ago [January 2015] when we engaged with LION, it was hard to get people in San Francisco to return your call, and the ones that we did get prices from were quite a bit higher. I found them to be quite honestly a nice middle ground. The guy in Sacramento had all the stuff offshore. He seemed like a reasonable guy, but I wanted a little bit more hands on where I could go in and meet with the designers, and that's what we found with LION.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We've got different projects with them. The first was just the web page build out. That's in the $10,000 to $50,000 range. Then, we hired them later on for help with UX/UI [user experience/user interface] design for our actual product – for our application. Again, that was between $10,000 and $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We originally engaged with them in January 2015. It was a month or two of engagement for the brand consulting about what are you trying to say, to whom are you trying to say it, and showing us ideas. The execution then took another two to three months. All in, I would say it was less than six months – in the four to six months range from initial contact through execution.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I wish I did. The reason I don't have more information about that is that the product that we've been building in the background with our actual application that we want to hook up to the marketing page isn't done yet. We did a limited alpha outreach the last March-April [2016] timeframe. What we discovered was that the product wasn't ready for broader use, and we went back to the engineers and needed to refactor the product.

The reality is we've never hooked up the marketing engine. We've never done any sort of AdWords or inbound marketing campaigns to draw attention to the site. The site gets some limited attention I think just because it's been around now for a while. The longer your site is up and running, Google bumps up its rankings. The reality is we have not marketed our product.

How did LION Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

I think generally reasonably well. I think I would describe them as a competent web design shop who understands the word space and is branching out in the UX/UI. Do they have a super deep bench of project management and looking at stuff? No, but we understood that. I would say adequate – good but maybe not great. It doesn't feel like you have their full attention or a dedicated team that's nurturing you all the way along because quite honestly that's not where we are as a company. If we had $100,000 or $250,000 to spend, you might expect that, but I think based on what we got, it felt like it was good value.

What distinguishes LION Interactive from other providers?

I don't know if I would say there's anything unique. LION Interactive is a competent Bay Area web design team who is hands on and gets the job done. You could spend a lot more; you could probably spend less. I felt like we got a good return on our investment.

Is there anything LION Interactive could have improved or done differently?

We engaged them for UX/UI when we found it very difficult frankly to hire a full-time UX/UI person. They did I thought a reasonably good job fleshing out some of the UX/UI of the application. Would I say that they are at the top of the heap in terms of UX/UI design? I would say no. I would say they're adequate, but I don't think they have a deep level of experience with UX/UI. Even though we used them, I don't think that's probably their strength. Their strength is in building a marketing site in WordPress, and they're very good at that.

Please describe your organization.

NarrativeWave is a data analytics company.

What is your position?

I was the CTO.

What business challenge were you trying to address with LION Interactive?

We had the whole concept of guided analytics, which is a relatively new form of analytics in the industry. We had a challenge of trying to figure out the right way to represent numerous different analytical paths in order to get to the root cause of any particular condition in an end user's dataset. We had this idea of being able to represent all these different paths and allowing the user to navigate through each of those different paths. We had some loose ideas on visuals that ended up being confusing to people more than anything, so that's what we wanted to engage Mark [Lion, partner at LION Interactive] for – to help figure out first how to represent and deal with that particular pattern. Beyond that, it was how to design the overall look and feel of the software so that it was basically delightful to use for our analytics customers.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

There were a couple different phases to the project. First and foremost, there was just the ideation and concept phase. That's where Mark provided great insight and helped us work through what it was that we were really trying to represent in the software and came to us with a number of different ideas and approaches and helped solidify our thinking process. Once we figured that out, we moved into the actual design phase, and his team worked on a couple different concepts for us and throughout the entire process kept engaging with us and validating with us the right approach, which was fantastic, until we came up with the design that we ultimately thought would be good to implement in the software. Finally, they actually helped us with the implementation of the front-end application. They took a JavaScript framework that we asked them to use, built all of the logic for the front-end and the interaction of it so that we could tie it into our back-end components.

How did you come to work with LION Interactive?

I've worked with him on numerous projects. Back when I started a video game company called Telltale years ago, we were first introduced to Mark. In my several different years' experiences with him on various projects, he exhibited the same deep insight into what the problem was and how to address it that he did with NarrativeWave.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It cost between $10,000 and $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

That project is finished.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We had plenty of very excited responses to the particular visualization that Mark chose for our tree analysis – the analytical path analysis. That got many people excited, helped us close on one major proof of concept with a very big Fortune 500 company. It absolutely helped us close on customers.

How did LION Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

LION Interactive did fantastic. Their team was very helpful and accommodating and very much felt like part of the team as we were building out concept and back-end functionality.

What distinguishes LION Interactive from other providers?

Just all around they're extremely professional. LION Interactive are very insightful, helpful, very patient – certainly when dealing with very ambiguous product specifications – and they helped to solidify that. I think LION Interactive were very critical in just helping turn our general idea into a very specific and attractive reality. The more clarity you have on your product, the better off you're going to be. That said, I wouldn't shy away from engaging them prior to that because they're going to end up providing some very useful insight as part of that process.

Is there anything LION Interactive could have improved or done differently?

I'd have to say no. Just based on my recollection, they were very helpful the entire way, through the entire process.